-- Intro –-
Chris Moriarty
Hello, my name’s Chris Moriarty and welcome to Workplace Geeks. The podcast that uncovers the world's most innovative, exciting, thought provoking research and speaks to the people behind it. And boy, do we have a belter for you today is the longest interview we've had so far. So, in the interest of keeping this episode around the one-hour mark, we're going to keep housekeeping to a minimum. So just remember to find us on LinkedIn, email hello@workplacegeeks.org and pass the pod on to a friend. Now that's the housekeeping done. But what we want to do is give our next guest proper billing. And for that, I'm going to hand over to Mr. Ian Ellison, Ian tell everyone who we're about to hear from.
Ian Ellison
So today, Chris, we've got Jack Niles, and what an honor and a privilege is to have jack on the show. So, for anyone who hasn't heard of Jack, he is known worldwide, as the father of telecommuting. And this is because he coined the phrase and undertook the first study into its viability at the University of Southern California, in 1973, published a report in ‘74 and turn that report into a book in ‘76. So just made me think in 1974 well, that was the year I was born. So, I was definitely in terry towel in nappies. Chris, how old were you in 1974?
Chris Moriarty
I think is more telling to tell how hold my mum was my mum was 15, my dad was 21, and I was eight years from existence. My parents hadn't even met when this report was written.
Ian Ellison
There you go, that puts things into perspective, timescale wise, is also incredibly humbling, because not only is Jack 89 years old, now, he's also still working really, really hard on a daily basis on the stuff that matters. So, we're gonna get to all of that just now. But we just need to quickly introduce and frame the study because Jack takes off with an account, and you kind of need a bit of the backstory to understand kind of where he goes off from. So, you know, in his capacity as director of interdisciplinary research programs at the USC, Jack worked with three other gentlemen on this study, and probably more besides, but the people named in the book are Dr. Frederick Carson, Dr. Gerald Hanuman, and Dr. Paul Gray. And they're all from different faculties. They're from different areas of the University of Southern California. And what that allows them to do is essentially sort of crack open, this exploration of the potential, the possibility, the viability of telecommuting as an alternative to traditional ways of office based working to crack it open, almost like a huge PESTEL analysis to be able to sort of explore it, justify evidence, it from technological perspectives, from behavioral perspectives, from motivational perspectives, economic perspectives, and then using it with real life organisations with case studies to really explore that viability. So, you know, it is an astonishing piece of work from almost 50 years ago, which has got so much relevance. And I think that's why we're so excited.
Chris Moriarty
So, before we get going, I just wanted to give you a quick note about the potential for some background noise with Jack. So, we had whilst we were interviewing, and we had some email alerts coming through these, these really loud dings, now, we think we've managed to snip them out because they were happening at really convenient times for us, but they were still there. Nonetheless, you might just hear the echo of one or two.
Now the reason we couldn't turn these things off is because Jack didn't know which one of his five computers that ding was emanating out of, yes, this man had five computers on the go. And just a really emphasise that point that Ian made about this guy being still very active, and still very switched on to today's challenges and trying to push this work. And these ideas. He has since emailed us though and updated us on the fact that he has found the source of the ding and got rid, so we can all rest assured that his next interview won't have to battle that. So, without any further ado, over to the compadre of telecommuting himself, Mr. Jack Niles.
-- Interview –
Chris Moriarty
Okay, so Jack, welcome to the workplacegeeks podcast before we get going before we dive into your research, just tell us a little bit about you, your career and the work that you do.
Jack Niles
I was trained initially as a physicist, and an engineer and the first 15 years of my professional career designing intelligence equipment of various sorts, but most of it spaceborne in both electronic and optical kinds of gadgets that I can't really talk about anymore, but towards the end of that period, after we had done many things, for the first time anybody had done it sort of stuff in space, it started to get kind of boring. And as part of this, I started looking around for ways we could apply this technology to the real world, you know, the earth rather than the space world.
And at one point, I would have another, go to Santa Barbara, California to talk to one of the county planners there. And he said to me, you know, if you guys can put man on the moon, and I said, Yeah, I didn't help NASA select the cameras to find the landing place for the Apollo program. He says, well, so why can't you do something about traffic? That's very, why not really struck me. And I had that aha moment. So, I thought about it for a while and said, you know, this is this is really interesting thing, we can really change the way the world works, if we got rid of a lot of this traffic. So, I put together a proposal for my company, and I happen to be the secretary for the Corporate Research Committee and said, I got this great idea. Why don't we study the idea of substituting telecommunications for transportation? And they said, so okay, what would we have to do? And I said, well, we'd have to hire probably a couple of lawyers, and some psychologists, sociologists, to find out how to actually get this done, right? And I said, No, no, no, no, no. We are engineers were metal benders. We don't deal with this touchy-feely stuff. I really wanted to do this as a geez, I can't do this. I was complaining about this to a friend of mine who used to be in the laboratory’s division of our country but had moved to the University of Southern California to set up there. So, they could teach graduate engineering students engineering, wherever they worked, instead of having him come to campus. And I explained this, you know, here's what I like to do is get some experiments going to see how this stuff works. In a general case, for businesses and all sorts of things, and I can't get my company to it. Can you do it here? And they introduced me to a couple people said, Yeah, that's interesting, but not what I want to do. So, I said, Alright, my friend said, why don't you talk to the executive vice president, the university, and tell him your ideas. So, he set up an appointment, and I came to the VP and I said, Look, my problem is, I have something I want to do that requires the input from lots of different disciplines.
You have different disciplines. I come from a business where I'm really good at organising different kinds of companies. So, I've got the managerial techniques, you've got the disciplines, why don't I set up a program here? And they said, Okay, I've tried it. You know, what will we call you? I said, Well, why don't you make me director of interdisciplinary program development? Okay, done. Yup. So, I had this new job reporting to the President University. And the title was director of interdisciplinary program development. And since nobody had a clue as to what that meant, he gave me free hand to do all sorts of things. So, I put together a team made of people from the School of Engineering, the business school, and the Annenberg School of Communications, you know, so that sociologists their business school of business guys and engineering school, I had it.
And because of the enormous business contacts that University of Southern California had, we said, you know, who will we get to work with us? I said, Look, I do not want to have a project where we all we deal only with graduate students. We got to deal with people in real companies, and this has to work in the real world, it has to have a bottom line impact, or nobody will pay much attention and they did it with a bunch of kids. You know, we don't that doesn't make a difference to us. So, we enlisted a major national insurance company into trying this out. Now, the insurance company was not at all interested in my idea about the telecommunications, transportation tradeoffs, they are interested in reducing their turnover rate. Because as it turned out, roughly a third of their employees left every year and they had to be rehired new ones, that was costing him a lot of money, just recruiting and retraining to get people going.
So, they said, we’re early industry, if you can cut down that leaving rate, good. We did a quick survey of where the employees lived that worked for the insurance company. And air mostly in the San Fernando Valley of California, the other side of the hills from the downtown, headquarters of the insurance company. So, I said, what, why don't you put offices where the employees live near where they live. So, they can, they don't have to drive a car to work. They don't have to get in the traffic, they can walk, or bicycle or things like that. And they said, Well, okay, so what we'll try it. And they did, and we ran this test for several months. And sure enough, at the end of this, we calculated that the company could save something like four and a half million dollars a year, by getting its employees to work at one or more of these satellite offices. By the way, this was all in 1973, 1973 it was not possible to have people working at home, connected full time to a downtown computer, because the phone bills would be would kill them. So, the setup we had then was that at these satellite offices, we'd set up a mini computer, the employees would work with, you know, dumb terminals connected the minicomputer all day. And the minicomputer would upload all their data to the mainframe at night. Sure, worked out fine.
Chris Moriarty
So, this case study that you did this this, I you know, several months long experiment that's, that's essentially what fed into this book, then the telecommunications transportation trade off. That's the story because I mean, obviously read it in preparation for this interview. And it won't be the first time I've said this on this podcast, when you read a piece of work that's not immediately currently published in the last year or so. There are so many things in this that just felt so similar to some of the challenges we still face today. But I just I was interested, because you've talked about the insurance company and the bottom line and the you know, the guy challenging you to getting rid of traffic as motivations, but I also picked up things, it references things like urban growth, energy shortages, and transportation congestion. So, there's this sort of societal motivation behind this as well isn't that?
Jack Niles
Well, those were actually my main interests. Even though I was trained as an engineer, my undergraduate work was a liberal art, and really liked to spend a lot of time looking at all the other things, you know, where, I really believe that, you know, everything's connected to everything else. And in order to make a major impact on the world, you have to check out all these things. So that's why although I had experts from engineering and social studies and business, my main goal was to also look at the other aspects of this stuff as well. So that's, that's what's in the book, after we had finished this project very successfully. The president a company said, well, is great, but we're not going to do it.
And I said, you're not going to do it. we figured out you can save four and a half million dollars a year with basically no extra costs. You know, that's the that the net saving is four and a half million dollars. What's the problem? He says, Well, we're a non-union company. And we feel that if you had employees, you know, scattered all over the country side, why the Union could come in and pick them off one by one and all of a sudden, we'd be unionized. So, forget about it, three months later, I was in a conference in San Francisco, I think with the research head of the AFL CIO, labour organisations, and I explained what he was doing nice. Yeah, this is a terrible idea. I said, why is that? He says, Well, if you have these people scattered all over the place, how the hell will we ever get them organised, the paradoxes I have been living with ever since.
Ian Ellison
Chris described it to me as in some respects, like a really robust multifaceted business case where you were looking at all the different angles, and digging into them as much as you could, in a way to really kind of well to be able to make a recommendation or not. And when you then play back the punch line of that story that despite it saving year on year almost 5 million for this organisation, and I did my maths, and that's something like 30 31 million in real money. It was still turned down for reasons which are linked to politics, which are linked to organisational power and control, and which fundamentally are linked to people's hunches and gut feelings and prejudices, as opposed to the facts that you've meticulously investigated on their behalf. And at that, just it's, it's, it's not astonishing, it's sad, but you'd be wrestling with this for 50 years, right?
Jack Niles
Well, that's exactly and I'm just stubborn. So, by the way, as part of the part of the original project, when I, when I would tell people, I was working on this thing called telecommunications, transportation tradeoffs, you know, their eyes would sort of glaze over when I said that, I had to think of a more marketable term. So, I said, well, you know, we were trying to reduce commuting, basically, as my main interest was energy costs of all this commuting that we're doing. So, let's call it telecommuting, is substituting you know, telecommunications and computers for commuting, and telecommuting of that I thought that was fairly catchy. And it was the, the potential telecommuters loved it. Because they learned they were cutting out their commute. And as we see, now, they still love it.
Chris Moriarty
I just wonder whether part of it felt like it was almost too good to be true. I mean, what we're talking about stacks and stacks of money, I guess, is there an element, a business leader might almost be embarrassed that something that they were doing was so unnecessary and costly, and there's you and your research team who, you know, we're looking at this very objectively, saying hey, you're making a big mistake doing like this, you should do it like that. And that almost that was getting in the way was almost like the results are too good.
Jack Niles
Its, most senior managers are concerned with the next quarter, they figure, chances are pretty good that three, four or five quarters from now, they'll be doing another job. So, trying to save something that's long-term benefit, is not really going to reward them much. So, they’d rather ignore it. And that's basically what I discovered for the next 40 years, was the main pediment impediment to all this stuff,
Ian Ellison
You must have incredible belief in, in the cause in what you're trying to solve. And also, in the value of the solution, I guess
Jack Niles
Well, I didn't, you know, I've always had enough people around who believed in what I was doing. So, like, I could say to myself, Well, I'm not totally crazy. There are other crazy people out there to join me, as I just kept with it
Ian Ellison
What did it feel like coming together and designing a project which was so diverse and multifaceted? What was it like with you and your colleagues at that point
Jack Niles
This is where my aerospace experience came in very handy, because I was used to working with companies coming in and building a new satellite program from all different pieces of interest in is most of my engineering of course, but they all they had their own ideas. And I had figured out ways to one way or another you know, lock them all in a room till they finally started talking to each other rather than at each other. And that takes time. And it took time in the project at USC, but it finally happens you just get them together and keep hammering at look, here's what's the real content we're talking about needs to be in how do you do it? So, as its as long arduous process progresses, as a matter of fact, in the, in this I wrote probably the first paper I wrote, while I was doing this was on the management of interdisciplinary research, which won a prize from the Society Research administrators, so I knew I'd hit, a hit a bell here on one thing or another. And I've had requests ever since now. And then I'd get one from some frazzled member of the faculty saying, How the hell do you get interdisciplinary research done, I said, take a deep breath, take several deep breaths, right? And just persist. Lock him in a room, get him to talk to each other. And it'll all work out. You know, it's a lot like herding cats, but you can once get him going in the right direction.
Chris Moriarty
One of the things that we've talked about in a number of episodes now is getting multiple disciplines in one room, right? You know, that's why me and him probably have jumped on it, because it's been brought up several times in previous episodes, and people are really interested about in our world, bringing non-workplace orientated disciplines to the table. But I guess the risk is, and I guess what you're hinting at when you're talking about talking at or to people. And the difference between it is that it does mean that people have got a very narrow lens makes it sound negative, but they've got a very kind of fixed window by which they look through their research. And there's a danger that they don't all overlap. So, was that your role, really, to help share the bigger picture? And to keep people on track? Did you have to do a lot of that as well?
Jack Niles
Yeah, exactly, exactly. And, in fact, one of the problems is that people in different disciplines will use the same words but mean different things by them. And there, that's a subtle difference that you have to unfurl. While you, while this discussion goes on, it's now it's interesting. There's never a dull moment. Basically, technology has never been a problem in teleworking, there was always better technology available, then there were people who were allowed to work this way, because their management was terrified of this. So, the essentially management's always been the problem, as far as I can see, to convince a company to do this, and make a quantum leap in their attitude to change in the actually actual way they're working, instead of what they didn't really think about is, well, this, people have always been working this way. So, let's, let's just do this. It's more comfortable just to do things, the way we've always had to do it.
One, you know, one of my ideas at the beginning was the energy problem, you know, energy problem was going to get worse now that has morphed into global warming is going to get worse. And if we don't do something serious about this, we're all going to be in deep trouble. So that's been sort of an underlying theme I have. I don't like to threaten people, you know, if you don't do something, you're gonna die. But there was this, this idea behind it, which has kept me going, but I digress.
Ian Ellison
Okay, so the, you've alluded to this several times, Jack, the fact that lots of this study kind of proved in lots of different ways, economic ways, environmental ways. Workflow ways, lots of different ways that this was a viable alternative. But most times, or all of the times it was essentially management resistance. I mean, I got a couple of quotes from different interviews that you've had for what it says, this is you talking so the experiment was a success, but the company said, no, we're not going to do that from every direction, we got resistance. And this was my early lesson, this was going to be hard to sell. They used to business as usual. And I've been fighting that ever since you've brought that to life for us. Did you discover that through your research your GTU discover that through presenting your research findings and then seeing how people react it?
Jack Niles
Well, all of the above, actually, after the, my initial experiences with this, as I look for a brief period after the project had ended. I spent a lot of time wandering among the various agencies of the federal government trying to get some more applied research on this expanding these different aspects. I went to the department transportation and said, here’s what we're trying to do that. And I said, No, no, no, no. This is not our mission. Our mission is not to get rid of a transportation is our mission is to make transportation more efficient. And they said, okay, and I'm not I go to the Department of Energy says no, no, no, our mission is to make fossil fuel more efficient not to get rid of the use of petroleum, and so on and so on everybody, everybody had to had this a narrow vision of their mission, and they couldn't think of different aspects of why their mission was to get people off this drug.
I became pretty convinced by time, I had to have other demonstration project that had some leverage. So, 10 years later, after Gaullist, I set up another project at USC, that now involve several Fortune 100, corporations, and got them to try telecommuting and see if it worked. And they loved it. Several of them, I've adopted it, and they finally talked there, their CEOs into it. But those were these are mostly hide, you know, the high-tech corporations such as IBM, a TNT, and other, you know, others were technologically oriented to begin with. And they, they got into this, but the problem was, they wouldn't let me talk about them as doing this, you know, again, we'll do this stuff, but you can't tell him that we supported it. So, I have a string of successes, none of which, can I tell what company it was, I've got to try this in a public sector instead, where that isn't going to be against constraint.
And around 1985, fella came to me from the state of California. And he was he was trying to make real estate decisions. He wanted to reduce the amount of real estate, the state of California used for office space in Sacramento, and could I help them, I said, Sure. I said, set up a project or which ran from late 80s to 1990. Again, it got a same kind of results, productivity went up, turnover rate went down, people felt more in control of their lives, they loved us, you know, working. And this time we got them, you know, to work from home, part of the time, the technology had progressed to the point where homework was possible, rather than people going to satellite centres. And this started to get more results around the world. And people started to pay attention. In the 1990s, my wife and I spent a lot of time commuting to Europe to convince the Europeans that this was a good idea. But every time we ran is same thing might be good for these other people, but not for us. So, it's there's always this resistance to change.
Chris Moriarty
I wondered about that when you when you talked about IBM, it kind of felt like, I'd sort of thinking back to the insurance company that ultimately didn't go ahead with it. But if an organization had sort of broken new ground, and it saved millions and millions of dollars, then is that you sort of suggesting they didn't want to really say shout about that? Because they didn't they wanted to benefit from that competitive advantage for a period before everyone else cottoned on to the fact that they could save millions of dollars, which is, which is I mean, it's a weird one, right? Because that's kind of good, in the sense that organisations recognise the value, but going back to your motivations or the societal impacts, you need everyone to get into it. Right, not just the odd, forward thinking company.
Jack Niles
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I wanted to get obvious, well known example. So, people would, you know, say, aha, they'll get the same aha, that I didn't hit on 1970 whenever this started, let's say, Hey, man, we could really change things around this way. But I always kept running against this, that management for one reason or another, either because we don't like to change, or we like to keep it to ourselves and not tell our competitors about it. I couldn't think figure out the magic stick it would take to hit people over the head and say pay attention to this.
Chris Moriarty
Well, that that kind of happened in 2020 didn't Jack, you know that's the really obvious, but really obvious kind of elephant in the room here which is it took a global I mean, the obviously the pandemic was terrible for lots of people and tough for lots of different reasons. But it's, you know, part of the reason you picked up on our radar is that it kind of generated this renascence for the idea, which I guess for you must have been great in one aspect, but kind of frustrating that everyone finally caught up. And it took something as drastic as what we've been through in the last few years to realise there might be a better way of doing things.
Jack Niles
And there's still lots of resistance, you know, the big financial centres want all their people back in the office. Why? Because they spent, we're into these big leases for all his real estate, through office space. And if we don't fill it up, you know, we're in deep trouble. Okay. So the interesting part about talking a company into adopting telecommuting is, you talk first the CEO, to say, you know, can we just test this out, when you guys sit, you know, prove to you that it works, then you talk to the facilities manager, because the long term effect of this is you're not going to need as much office space. And you're going to have to design it differently, from the way you've been doing it before. And finally, you know, you get down the lingo, you go the personnel manager, and so you're gonna have to train people to do this properly, particularly the managers.
So, they're the sequence that we tested out and has worked pretty well. Over the years. That's, that's the order in which he talked to people about this. When we, when we set up training situations for a company to finally decide to do it, we'd first talk the CEO into it, then you have training sessions for the middle managers, because they're the ones who are going to be even more terrified of this than anybody else. And then you talk to the prospective telecommuters, no problem finding people who are going to resist not commuting to work, if they, if they get any kind of traffic when they're doing it.
Ian Ellison
If you're saying I mean, I think what you've kind of described there, Jack was almost a consulting methodology, a change management, change Leadership methodology to embed this stuff, when you found the organisations that really wanted to give it a go. So, what did the world grappling with working from home look like from your 50-year informed mountaintop?
Jack Niles
The first thing when the COVID reared its ugly head with the thought, Oh, my God, all of these people are going to be suddenly thrust into this. Now, I've been trying to get them to kind of ease their way in by starting, you start out with a test project, and then you spread it out from there and slowly spread it through the company. No, no, no, overnight, they're changing their way of working entirely, with no preparation whatsoever. You know, the time I spent in the aerospace industry, a good part of it was spent putting together long lists of what could go wrong. And we're pretty imaginative and thinking of things that can go wrong and figuring out how to make that not happen. Okay, we did the same thing, with the first telecommuting project, you know, what could go wrong?
And what would you do about it if it happened, and we pretty well, had them figured out so the only is, most of those things we thought might go wrong didn't. But it was because we re trained the people properly ahead of time and put the policies and procedures together so that there's always a manual someplace where they can look to say, Oh, here's what we do, in case this happens. case, my computer breaks case, my kid gets the flu, and I have to stay home, I had a whole list of things like this.
But none of this was available to all these companies in the COVID situation. And I thought, boy, this is gonna be a disaster. And it turned out, they worked a lot better than I thought they would. A lot of the companies I've talked to many of them, who, who just spent some very anxious days or weeks to begin with, but they managed to muddle their way through this and come out reasonably well. Not that not by any means perfect, but in many cases, they're much better off than I thought they'd be. So, I gradually was able to release my, my breath. Take a few deep breaths and say hey, it's a good success, after all
Chris Moriarty
Which I guess there's an element of that, which is, you know, taking choice away, right, because I suppose up until that point, managers and leaders had this, you know, kind of stay or go kind of, you know, do we go ahead with what Jack suggesting or do we do we stick what we got to and you're kind of intimated earlier that staying is a much easier decision sticking to what you know is much easier than changing.
But I wonder there was something that cropped up in when I was reading through, I wonder whether the workforce his attitudes have changed as well, which made it slightly easy because there was a stat in your original work. That said 51% of people would, would prefer not to work in their homes. Now, I think you've already touched on, there was a practical reason for that, because the technology would have made the phone bills eyewatering. But do you think there's also a sense that society has moved on slightly in-home design has moved on and the way we live? Our lives have moved on, it made that a bit more of an open door to push against?
Jack Niles
Yes, yes, it has, certainly, you know, attitudes have changed, and millennials are much more open to this. In fact, a lot of them will say I want to accept a job at Corporation XYZ, unless I can work at home at least some of the time, post COVID, a lot of older people are saying the same things now let you know, people have left the office. Because you know, enough of this, the only way you're going to attract me back to your company is for me to work at home
Ian Ellison
So what do you think this means for the future of work? And where do you stand on the organisations that are being very directive, and prescriptive about three days in the office or two days at home or whatever, versus the organisations that are saying, hey, you guys figure it out. Okay, so some departments, it might mean, coming together for a week, a month, and for and that's absolutely fine. And for other departments, it might be one day a week, but whatever you need to do to make it work,
Jack Niles
You have got to adjust your workforce. For one thing, you have to analyse what they actually do, and when they do it, and how they do it. And adjust your inter personal communications such that when they need to communicate with other people face to face, as is typical in periods of uncertainty where new projects coming up, and they're trying to get organised, or people or when some something goes wrong, and you're trying to fix things out there, you need people to work together face to face, because the communication paths are much richer than even the technology paths allow today.
But the rest of the time, get them to work wherever that's, that's good for them, you know, the work that gets done as it were generally done solo, the organising it is done with people together. And it just depends on what's going on at the moment as to how this works out. So, you know, I've always maintained look, tell this is a tool. It's a working tool that you can adapt to whatever goes on in your company, it is flexible, it can be adapted to pretty much any situation, the constraints are that occasionally you do need to get people together. And you have to have office space somewhere for that. Because people get terrified by zoom after a while. They really want to see real people together. So, you have to do this.
Chris Moriarty
Jack, when you, when you did this research originally, you pointed to oil, as you know, one of the kind of social benefits in and there was lucky I think you mentioned in the paper, there's kind of the oil crisis and you know, that kind of sharpen the focus on transportation. And then you sort of fast forward to today and sadly, we haven't really moved away from this reliance on oil. I mean, we've got the stuff going on in Eastern Europe, which is highlighting that again, you know, and reliance and, you know, the UK Prime Minister go into different countries trying to strike deals to secure oil supplies.
And we've got I don't know if you've seen this in the UK, we've had a little spate of activists interrupting, what you would call a soccer match, Jack, you're interrupting soccer matches and tying themselves to the goalposts and you know, with a stock oil campaign, so we're still in that kind of in that kind of crisis. And in fact, it's probably gotten a little bit more worrying, although we're starting to see governments and society and organisations and all you know, some of the systems are kind of just feels like some of the systems you've described are starting to catch up and focus in we're starting to see electric cars, we're starting to see alternative power coming through. Do you think that's going to start to unlock some of the systems that you are finding yourself butting up against when you are trying to change people's way of thinking,
Jack Niles
Oh, I put it, it has to it must unlock things, otherwise, we are all in serious trouble. Because the global temperature is inching up day by day, despite all the promises at COP 26 People are saying, Yeah, we're going to, we're going to fix this down the road from here, you know, after it's not my watch anymore. So, we're all saying, well, we'll shove it off for now. But fellas, we can't afford to do that anymore. Somewhere in my blog, in the last few months, I've got a, I've got a little bar chart that says, here's what the price of getting to zero by 2050 is going to be, depending on when you actually start doing it. And so far, we haven't started decreasing our releases of co2 in the atmosphere.
So, every year the price goes up. Because to get down to this, you're going to have to do many more things, and you're gonna have to do it faster. That's like, ultimately, we're gonna have tenfold COVID every year, if we don't get something started now, because a lot of these things have great inertia, you can’t build entire solar system arrays overnight. There's a lot of things you can't do, you can't get co2, inhalers that pull that stuff out of the atmosphere overnight. You can't go change biodiversity overnight, you can't cut the Brazilians off from cutting down the Amazon for grazing land for beef, which you shouldn't be eating in the first place, overnight. All this stuff takes time. It has enormous and nourish and we're not pushing hard enough. So, this is basically this is what I'm spending most of my time on now.
Chris Moriarty
You shared with us in the email correspondence leading up to this interview you shared with us a i.e. a 10-point plan to cut oil use. And you know, when I opened it up, I had to smile because the number one point on that 10 Point plan. And I don't not sure what you know whether it was in any particular order, but it just, it's sitting there right in front of you the first thing it said, work from home up to three days a week where possible.
And so, it must, you know, it must feel a bit like a you know, a bit like Groundhog Day for you where you sit there going. I mean, you've just said that they're very passionate. I know how to do this, please, you know, let's, you've described so many problems that we've got at the moment, big, big, big problems. But this is when we can actually solve. You've written a blueprint 50 years ago and have been tinkering with it and improving it. And you know, during your work since we've had a pandemic that has given us the burning platform to prove scale that it works. It's about time to get on with it, isn't it?
Jack Niles
Yeah, my 1998 book, managing Telework is actually a manual how to do this. And it's now 24 years old. And you know, you have to forget the technology chapter because that's totally obsolete, but everything else works.
Ian Ellison
When we were saying or hinting that we might be speaking to you on LinkedIn before the interview, we invited folks to what would they like to know about what, waht they would like to ask you and we were very lucky in two to UK doctor friends of ours. Dr. Barry Haynes and Dr. Kirsten Saylor, both came with they were quite related questions and I think both of them talk to your 1998 book jack. So, Barry's question was what strategies can teleworking organisations adopt to minimise social isolation of teleworking and create a feeling of belonging? And Kirstin a couple of days later said, how to teams connected only via telecoms builds trust? Does it require regular face to face meetings? Or can you do without? And her reference was the importance for the climate emergency not just about post pandemic sort of hybrid working? So, you've got Barry asking about sense of belonging? And you've got Kirsty in asking about telecoms workers building trust together. So, from your 98 book, any pearls of wisdom to sort of develop those ideas?
Jack Niles
Again, depending on the circumstances of the job, and particular, what's going on at the moment. You need people occasionally to get together to communicate and the social aspects of this are important, you know, you need to know enough about people you're working with. So, my point I'm trying to get to earlier was in order to design how a team communicates with each other, you need to figure out sort of the ratio at which you need to have them together, face to face, and they need, they can do their thing apart. And that's, there is no magic number for that as people get more adept at communicating with each other over other media, that will, that will increase the ability to work from home, and probably reduce the need to communicate face to face, much in time. But that doesn't mean people don't socialise.
One of my original hopes was that people would now find out more about what's going on in their neighborhood, what's going on to school, what are the kids up to what's happening, you know, the rest in the rest of your life. And if they're working at home, that that's much more evident. And so, the socialisation goes on. We've also, as part of our training of telecommuters, say, it is your job, when working at home to be proactive in communicating with your colleagues. Don't wait for them to tell you about something, go on, check them out every day or two or whatever, find out what's going on. We found out after three years in the State of California project, that the telecommuters knew more about the office gossip than the people living in the office.
Ian Ellison
I'm wondering whether actually, you're saying that generally, you wouldn't advocate doing without you would advocate teleworking as part of the mix, which depends upon the context. But for most organisations, and for most, you know, social beings that we are, you do need to do that face to face stuff as well.
Jack Niles
Teleworking should not be a binary, you know, option you either do it or you're don't you know, no, it's, it's a tool, you use it when you want, it's useful. When you need people to get together, do it. What a lot of companies at this point now, having survived, you know, two years of COVID are starting to feel their way around what's the best combination of this to work, and that that will evolve. It may take another three or four or five years for this all to settle down and be the new normal. But I suspect that will happen.
-- Reflection Section --
Chris Moriarty
Hello, James, you you're the person that put jack on our radar. Just tell us how that came about what Google Search did you put in that pinned up Jack Niles in your in your search results?
James Pinder
We were writing a guidance note for professional body at the time. And it was around cultural aspects of I guess what is now hybrid working but you know, changing working practices following lockdown and the pandemic. And I guess one of the things I always like to do when I'm when we're working on something like that is to look back and see what's been written in the past and researched in the past around that topic. And as part of that sort of search process, I found references to the work Jack had done back in the 1970s. And there was some other interesting stuff that popped up as well. But clearly, you know, that was I think we described in the guidance now it was really a foundational study, because it was in terms of remote working and telecommuting, if you read the study is almost same foundational that some of the things that they were talking about, the technology kind of wasn't even there at the time. And it's clearly moved on since then.
And it's been around since then. So yeah, it just really stood out. I don't know if that's how I came across the study, but I think it was an article in The Atlantic magazine from 2050 was where I think I saw the reference and then I went and took back and found the book and bought a copy of the book and sort of got more familiar with the work that he did. So yeah, I guess that's just that part of the process of understanding what's come before you start looking at a topic in in depth because you may find that actually, as is often the case you're not the first one to look at the topic.
Ian Ellison
Well, that’s very wise to. And also, it sends this real message about doing your homework, doesn't it? Do your work, otherwise you risk completely reinventing the wheel or missing? Absolutely critical perspectives that wouldn't have been on your just your normal sort of bubble of Arabia.
James Pinder
And, what is interesting is they are, I mean, what's interesting in the 1970s, there were other things that were pushing at the time, you know, this sort of oil crisis that were pushing, you know, external macro factors that were pushing interest in the topic, and, and I guess they then subsided and that that sort of pressure disappeared a little bit. And, yeah, we've taken it for granted now that people are doing, you know, using teams and zoom all the time, but actually, prior to the pandemic, zoom wasn't mainstream was it? And I often say to Ian, you know, I remember when I started working for Loughborough University in 2008, we, I Skyped, all the time, because I worked as a as part of a dispute team, you know, with somebody in Japan and somebody, here, there and everywhere, and it almost became part of how we worked. But, you know, I know people that only really started using video calls for work purposes during lockdown, during the pandemic. And it really did, it really did nudge things along, in a big way didn't it
Ian Ellison
And there's an astonishing full circle this to this story as well, isn't that yeah, I that reference that Jack centres just before the interview, Chris, where he sent us that link to something that just been published by the IEA. And point one or point two, whatever it was, he was, was this advice about, you know, work from home, at least half of the week, two or three days, is, right now, when we've got a looming oil crisis, because of the problems in Eastern Europe is an absolute, like, you know, it's a no brainer, I have 10 points. It's like a key point that you can do. Now, that made me go, what's the IEA start on my radar and the International Energy Agency formed in 1974, as a response of the oil shocks, which is what triggered Jack's study, or one of the contributing factors, and we move on 50 years, and everything gets supercharged by a pandemic. And we're back in a potential oil crisis again, on top of a pandemic, which hasn't finished yet. I mean, that it's crackers in it.
Chris Moriarty
But we saw it, we saw it during the pandemic, we saw, like everyone started talking about how amazing it was the birds were singing, and, you know, there's all these photos of fish in Venice, and it's just that it was it went crackers and everyone sort of recognised actually hold on a minute. There's a there's a real impact here. We might you know, for Jack, I guess he must have been looking at it going well, this is this is the maybe the study, the scale of study I would love to have done because the whole world did it. You know, it was it was people I guess I had a sort of mixed view of people flippantly calling it the great homeworking experiment, it kind of felt like a kind of quirky, clickbait title, but it genuinely was Jack must have looked at it like this is a massive study. But it just, it just frustrates me and James, you talked about it as a foundational paper, I sit there, anytime we're doing research for this, particularly some of these papers that are, you know, Jeremy Marcin was 10 years ago. This is 50 years ago, and I'm sitting there just like, oh my god, the answers were there.
James Pinder
There is an episode on Freakonomics about three or four weeks ago that listened to and it was an academic from the University of Chicago called a quite a famous academic called John list. And he's it's areas around, you know, public policy and those sorts of initiatives. And it's got a book out at the minute, which is about why do, why do certain ideas, not scale, why, by the work in one context, and not in another. And it's a really interesting episode, and you know, you use this term about voltage, you know, the voltage effect. So, you might see benefits in one context, but then you, you go elsewhere, and you don't see those effects. And then suddenly, that idea loses credibility and Credence.
And that just really came to mind in a more tangential way, in terms of what Jack was talking about, because he offered reasons why he thought teleworking, hadn't sort of caught on. But I just that really resonated with me that episode in the centre. And also, it makes this distinction in the episode which is around. We always talk about research-based policy, and he sort of turns it on its head and says, actually, maybe one thing we need to think about more is policy-based research. Now, when I first heard that term, I was like, well, I'm not sure about that. But when he explains it, what he's saying is basically a lot of the time, we do studies into interventions. And we often the way those studies are set up, it's kind of it's almost as the best conditions for that study for that thing, and actually, then when you take that intervention elsewhere, where those conditions aren't the same, then it falls down.
And you know, it's a use the example of particular initiative in Chicago schools that worked really well showed loads of benefits in this particular context. And then it was taken elsewhere, and it sort of fell flat, it just didn't work. And the reason was, is in this study, the conditions because they got the best teachers, they got the, you know, the best setup. And then when they went into the real world, as it were, where you've got good teachers and bad teachers, this particular intervention just didn't work. And it just sort of resonated with me. And that, you know, perhaps we see that sometimes we see isolated studies in a workplace context that maybe, maybe, would they work elsewhere, where the conditions are different.
Ian Ellison
I've been wrestling with a similar thought, since probably listening to another Freakonomics episode about climate change. And why in the face of such compelling scientific evidence or engineering, sort of evidence, technical evidence, you've got problem economically to solution stacks up, I remember, is that distinctively kind of going. Okay, so we're particularly wrestling with, you know, a solution to the Brazilian rainforest, there is an economic solution, which makes perfect sense. So why doesn't it change that? So why, and it's because add to that, the political bits, there's almost like a four-box model, you got a technical solution, which economically stacks up, but then the politics gets in the way and messes stuff. And then the socio cultural peopley behavioral stuff, whatever that box is called, I can't think of a name for it. Those four boxes make sticky complex solutions. Even though the solution looks right on paper. It just seems to make them unimplementable for many, many applications.
Chris Moriarty
But Jack talks about that didn't he talked about? I went to the traffic guys and said, Oh, you know, we can get rid of this. There's no, no, we don't want to get rid of it. We don't want to get rid of it. We want, we want to make it more efficient. And the oil guys don't know, we don't want to get rid of it. You know, there was all these people that that suddenly thought, oh, no, no, we don't, we want to keep the thing going. We just think we might be able to do it better. And it's those sorts of things that must have been so frustrating for him. And it's amazing that he's still banging the drum now.
Ian Ellison
My mind kept going to Anthony Giddens and I've sort of wrestled with this since and its good keeps going to Anthony Giddens for sort of two distinct reasons. So, Anthony Giddens is one of the UK is most famous social scientists. Again, a bit like Jack a lifelong career, lots of influence, in different ways. But when it comes to the climate change bit that Jack is so concerned about and the fact that the more time we waste getting organised or failing to get organised, the cumulatively more costly and everything that it becomes further down the line. And so, the givens talked about this in the mid 2000s. He gave it a name, and it was a slightly arrogant academic name, because he called it after himself, but he called it Givens paradox.
And the point was, by the time we realise something needs to happen, it's going to be too late. But we need to do something now. And by the way, that was about 17 years ago when he coined this phrase. But nobody has any desire to do anything now because the levers for change aren't strong enough. So that was one side of Anthony Giddens. The other bit about Anthony Giddens was, he recognised that, even when it makes logical sense to do something, and you've got evidence for why that's the case, that doesn't change people's minds. And he gave it a terrible name. He called it the under determination of theory by facts, which is about as warm as it gets for a model, right.
But the point is, if I believe something, and we see this in politics, we see this every time the general election or whatever. If I believe something, it doesn't matter what you show me, I'm never going to believe different. The truth isn't enough. We see it with vaccines, it’s just perceptions are so much louder than evidence. And that's what telecommuting wrestles with, that's what hybrid wrestles with in organisations with embedded ways of working, that's what responding to the climate emergency, wrestles with everything, wrestles with it, and it's just this underlying facet of who we seem to be as a as a species,
Chris Moriarty
Hearts and minds isn't it? hearts and minds. There's a reason both of those are in there. Right, James? We're going to let you go. You've got anything planned for the rest of the day?
James Pinder
See you later. Bye.
-- Outro –
Chris Moriarty
So that's all for now. I hope you enjoyed listening to this as much as me and Ian enjoyed talking to you Jack, just remember to find us on LinkedIn, email your thoughts, questions, suggestions to hello@workplacegeeks.org and pass the pod on to a friend. Jack's book, if you're interested, got reprinted in 2007 and is available on Amazon. The other book he references is called Managing telework strategies for managing the virtual workplace. And that's also available there as well. As well as that if you want some quick reading, Wired did a recent article on Jack and the birth of telecommuting and we'll stick that along with everything else I've just mentioned in the show notes for you, but until then speak soon. Bye for now.
